ExhibitionIdentity and Activism

Since the 1960s, social movements have defined health rights as essential to ending the second-class status of marginalized groups.

The feminist health movement advanced a powerful critique of traditional medicine, insisting on women’s knowledge and control of their own bodies. Disability rights activists fought discrimination, and the AIDS movement transformed medical research and drug development while defending the civil and human rights of communities devastated by the epidemic.

Geraldine Smith of the National Welfare Rights Organization speaks to a reporter about her appearance before the American Hospital Association, 1970

Courtesy National Library of Medicine

Poverty advocates insisted that poor people and Medicaid recipients be treated with dignity and respect by the medical system. In 1970, members of the National Welfare Rights Organization picketed a meeting of the American Hospital Association, demanding that hospitals receiving federal funding fulfill their obligations to accept patients regardless of income.

Activists supporting Section 504, a federal law to ban discrimination against the disabled, sit-in for 3 and a half weeks at the San Francisco office of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, 1977

Photograph by HolLynn D’Lil

As the disability rights movement fought discrimination against disabled Americans, they also demanded the expansion of home and community based services, and equal access to medical care and insurance.

Nurse Diane Jones treats a patient with AIDS at San Francisco General Hospital, 1984

Courtesy Gypsy Ray

Members of the group ACT UP demand improved AIDS care at Kings County Hospital, New York, 1989

Courtesy National Library of Medicine

In response to the devastating AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, people with HIV/AIDS and their supporters organized a powerful social movement that fought for speeding the approval of new drugs and treatments, and access to care.